Early Language Learning: The Impact of Teaching and Teacher Factors

Suzanne Graham,Alan Tonkyn,Louise Courtney,Theodoros Marinis

doi:10.1111/lang.12251

Abstract

AbstractThis study examined the progress in lexical and grammatical knowledge among 252 learners of French in England across the last two years of primary education and into the first year of secondary school in relation to teaching and teacher factors. It compared linguistic outcomes from two different approaches, one which emphasized oracy and the other which combined literacy with attention to oracy development. We also explored the relationship between linguistic outcomes and other teaching/teacher factors: teaching time, teacher level of French proficiency, and teacher level of training in language instruction. Learners completed a sentence repetition task and a photo description task, making small but statistically significant progress in both grammatical and lexical knowledge between test points. While teaching approach had little impact on such progress, other teaching and teacher factors did, particularly the French proficiency level of the primary school teacher and the amount of teaching time devoted to French.Open PracticesThis article has been awarded an Open Materials badge. All materials are publicly accessible in the IRIS digital repository at http://www.iris-database.org. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.

Highlights

This study investigated the nature of the progress made by young learners of French as a foreign language in England across the last two years of primary education and the first year of secondary school
A one-factor repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated that there was a significant effect for time for the sentence repetition (SR) task, F(2, 318) = 118.28, p < .001, ηρ2 =
Similar results were obtained for the photo description (PD) task, F(1.72, 272.77) = 96.53, p < .001, ηρ2 = .38, with significant progress across all three test points (p < .001) and small to medium effect sizes for T1–T2 (d = 0.27), T2–T3 (d = 0.45), and T1–T3 (d = 0.70)

Summary

Introduction

This study investigated the nature of the progress made by young learners of French as a foreign language in England across the last two years of primary education and the first year of secondary school. An investigation into the progress made by young learners in classroom settings is timely and important because in recent years a growing number of countries have lowered the age at which instructed foreign language learning begins (Murphy, 2014) in the belief that an earlier start will lead to better learning outcomes. That such policy initiatives have been based on the extrapolation of findings from language learning in naturalistic settings to language learning in classroom contexts (Murphy, 2014) Such extrapolations seem to assume that both types of learning are identical and that an early start in classroom instruction will automatically lead to rapid, effortless learning. Any age advantage reported for naturalistic foreign language learning (e.g., discussed in Munoz, 2008) has not been found in rigorous, longitudinal studies in instructed contexts, with a later start (e.g., at age 11), often resulting in faster, more efficient learning, as was found, for example, for learners of English in Spain (Munoz, 2006), learners of French in England (Myles & Mitchell, 2011), and learners of English in Germany (Jaekel, Schurig, Florian, & Ritter, 2017)

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion